The Guardian's Filter team has tested and ranked six of the most popular e-readers on the US market for autumn 2026, aiming to help buyers pick a device suited to their budget, reading habits or family needs. The guide matters because e-readers now offer meaningfully different features than in past years, becoming lighter, brighter and more capable, while Kindle prices have risen owing to increased memory and storage costs, making comparison shopping more worthwhile.

The top pick is the Kobo Libra Colour, praised for its direct integration with library-lending service OverDrive/Libby, extensive font and display customisation, physical page-turn buttons, easy file transfers via Dropbox and Google Drive, and stylus support for annotating PDFs, though it is criticised for its high price and shorter battery life. A cheaper alternative, the Kobo Clara Color, drops some features such as the buttons and stylus but costs roughly £60/$80 less. Another highlighted model, the Kobo Clara BW, was praised for durability (surviving submersion in water), strong battery life, fast charging and generous 16GB storage capable of holding well over 180 PDFs.